We build culture from culture, and let’s stop acting as if any one of us owns it.

David Shields, from Reality Hunger:

This book contains hundreds of quotations that go unacknowledged in the body of the text. I’m trying to regain a freedomthat writers from Montaigne to Burroughs took for granted and that we have lost. Your uncertainty about whose words you’ve just read is not a bug but a feature.

A major focus of Reality Hunger is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it. Or writing a book about destroying capitalism, but being told it can’t be published because it might harm the publishing industry.

Mr. Shields, of course, is not original. Just check out Jonathan Lethem’ s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.”

Or my piece, wholly indebted to Lethem,  entitled “Appropriation.”

Or David Markson, in Vanishing Point (at page 12): “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. As is already more than self-evident.”

Faking it in Amsterdam

In “Bamboozling Ourselves,” Errol Morris asks, “Why do people believe in imaginary returns, frauds and fakes? Bernard Madoff, A.I.G. , W.M.D.’s … How did this happen? Do we believe things because it is in our self-interest? Or is it because we can be manipulated by others? And, if so, under what circumstances?”

To explore these questions, Morris writes about Han van Meegeren, “arguably the most successful art forger of all time.” Van Meegeren, “a painter and art dealer living in Amsterdam was arrested for collaboration with the Third Reich. He was accused among other things of having sold a Vermeer to Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring – essentially of having plundered the patrimony of his homeland for his own benefit and the benefit of the Nazis.” Van Meegeren, however, claimed he had forged the Vermeer, as well as several others. As Morris concludes:

Han van Meegeren forged 11 Vermeers, a Frans Hals, a couple of de Hoochs and a Terborch. But . . . Van Meegeren’s greatest forgery was not any of his paintings. It was his biography. It was his success in convincing Joseph Piller, the Jewish agent of the Dutch Resistance who arrested him, and eventually the rest of the world that he was a folk-hero – a gifted artist who conned Göring – not a Nazi-sympathizer or collaborator. As such, forgery is similar to sleight of hand. You misdirect attention, emphasize certain details and suppress others. 

What gives money or art its value? Ask J.S.G. Boggs.

From Suite 101:

Although the United States Treasury Department has very strict and serious laws about the counterfeiting of currency, there is one law that is above them that they seem to recognize and that is the artists freedom of expression.

J.S.G. Boggs (born Steve Litzner) is most famous for his hand drawn, one-sided United States bills that he then exchanges for goods and services just like real money. His drawings show the hand of a master draftsman so much so that he has been arrested for his counterfeiting in England and Australia. Boggs was acquitted in both cases on the grounds that he was creating art and not forging or counterfeiting currency and trying to pass it off as such.

But Boggs’ creations are as elusive as his philosophy about the art he creates. He does not consider the drawn bank notes as money and they are commonly referred to as Boggs Notes, Boggs Bills, and Boggs Dollars. Boggs considers the art part of his work when he exchanges the bills, receives change, and receipt and goods. He then is willing to sell the receipt, change and goods as the art, not the original bill. If a collector wants a hand drawn Boggs Bill they will have to track down the lucky recipient themselves.

While Boggs art work could be considered hard to collect and esoteric he is taken seriously by the art world. The proof? His work is in the collections of the British Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian Institution.

One of my favorite books on the “value” of money is Lawrence Wechsler’s Boggs: A Comedy of Values.